Kenai Fjords National Park

Research at Kenai Fjords National Park this summer should provide a better understanding of how glaciers melt, move, and drain away their meltwater.

Summer brings a wealth of flowers to those parks that have enjoyed spring flowers like Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It also brings flowers to Rocky Mountain National Park and the parks in Alaska where the snow is just melting.

Kenai Fjords National Park, one of Alaska's few road-accessible national parks, is a wonderland of mountains, glaciers, and wildlife. Here are some numbers that tell the story.

If you need some inspiration for lending a hand on National Public Lands Day later this month, look no further than Gregory Kolenda and the work he accomplished at Kenai Fjords National Park.

For most, a national park vacation entails booking a room in a lodge or reserving a spot in a campground, arriving at the park and checking in, and then spending a number of days hiking, paddling, or traveling the park to view various sites, whether they focus on waterfalls, geysers, deep forests, museums, or cultural focal points. Here are some alternatives to that approach, some pricey, some not so.

It's not too soon to start dreaming about and planning for next summer's trip to Alaska, and the Alaska Railroad offers an appealing means of travel to a pair of outstanding parks: Denali National Park and Kenai Fjords National Park.

For more than a few of us, visiting many of our national parks can only be done vicariously -- most often while we're firmly seated in our most comfortable armchair, at that. So many far off places -- whether you're in Florida wondering about Denali or Glacier Bay national parks in Alaska, or in Alaska wondering about the Everglades or maybe Biscayne national parks in Florida -- can only be visited through words, videos, or audio.

Rehabilitation projects, invasive species eradication and biodiversity research were among the $27 million worth of Centennial Initiative projects for the National Park System announced Tuesday by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and NPS Director Mary Bomar.

The National Park Service began making National Accessibility Achievement Awards in 1999 to recognize outstanding accomplishments in architectural design, program design, and sustained efforts to improve accessibility for persons with disabilities. For the FY 2008 awards round, a five-member panel of experts will vet 14 nominations in four categories.

Never before have, and probably never again will, so many national parks come into existence on the same date. Given birth by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act were Denali, Gates of Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark and Wrangell-St. Elias national parks.

I hate jumping to conclusions. But that apparently is exactly what I did when I surmised that the proposed $1.5 million centennial project involving the Alaska Travel Industry Association would benefit the cruise-ship industry more than the parks.